Brain scan allows patient in ‘vegetative’ state to communicate
February 4th, 2010 - 1:04 pm ICT by ANILondon, Feb 4 (ANI): A patient previously considered unconscious, or being in a ‘vegetative state’, can understand and communicate, a groundbreaking research has shown.
Experts using brain scans have discovered for the first time that the man, who shows no outward signs of awareness, can not only comprehend what people are saying to him, but also answer simple questions.
Researchers found that brain imaging allowed the 22-year-old man, who had been diagnosed as vegetative for five years after a traffic accident left him with a traumatic brain injury, to answer a series of yes-or-no questions.
The research, published this week in the New England Journal of Medicine, has challenged clinicians’ definition of consciousness.
Patients are classified as unconscious, or being in a ‘vegetative state’, if they are unable to respond in any fashion to an extensive series of questions and requests.
But if the patient is completely unable to move, an aware or communicative mind could go unrecognized by this method of assessment.
“The conundrum with the vegetative state is that it’s a diagnosis made on lack of evidence,” Nature quoted neuroscientist Adrian Owen of the Medical Research Council’s Cognition and Brian Sciences Unit in Cambridge, UK, as saying.
During the study, Owen and colleagues asked the patient to imagine playing tennis when the answer to a question was yes, and to imagine walking through a house when the answer was no.
Visualizing these two activities stimulates different parts of the brain that are easily distinguished using fMRI.
They asked the patient a series of simple yes-or-no questions pertaining to his personal history, such as “Is your father’s name Alexander?”
He answered five out of six questions correctly. No brain activity was observed in response to the sixth question.
Owen said that the results suggest that fMRI could be useful in diagnosing unresponsive patients.
“There are things that are just not going to manifest themselves in outward behaviour. This method can tell us which patients are aware, and it can tell us what they are capable of,” Owen said. (ANI)
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